In France, Pesticides Get in Way of Natural Wines

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Visitors to La Dive Bouteille, the world's largest annual natural wine exposition. One challenge facing wine producers is that there is neither a definition nor regulation of what constitutes a "pure" or "natural" wine in France.CreditCreditCatalina Martin-Chico for The New York Times

TOURS, France — The task ahead of me was a two-day tasting marathon of wines with a welter of confusing labels: natural, organic, organic practice and biodynamic. But for Jean Bardet, a semiretired chef with two Michelin stars to his name, there was little confusion about the worthiness of such bottles.

“You have all these young people with rings in their noses who don’t know wine and say, ‘If it’s organic, it’s better,’ ” said Mr. Bardet, an expert on Loire Valley wines. “That’s crazy. Either wine gives pleasure and happiness or it does not. It’s all about taste.”

The night before the weekend tastings, Mr. Bardet hosted me and a friend at his sprawling home near Tours, which doubles as a cozy hotel where he cooks for his guests. He explained that he’s not pro-pesticide — after all, his huge fruit and vegetable garden here is pesticide-free. He is just anti-bad-winemaking.

The use of pesticides has become a major issue among French vintners and drinkers. Many dismiss the sudden cascade of new wines that proclaim their environmental virtue as New Age gimmickry. Others condemn the resistance to pesticides as a potential threat to other wines — the equivalent, some say, of refusing a vaccine.

But the weekend salons I attended bore witness that these wines are more than just a splash in the glass; they attest to a movement that has been growing for years in France and elsewhere to produce quality wine that is as pure as it can be.

There is broad agreement that France, the European Union’s largest agricultural producer, uses too many pesticides on all kinds of produce. The nation is the third-largest consumer of pesticides in the world, after the United States and Japan. Apples grown in southern France, for example, are subjected to about three dozen pesticides.

The pesticide and big-agriculture lobbies are strong, resisting any initiative that could affect farm yields, so there is little political will to take risks. In late January, the French agriculture minister, Stéphane Le Foll, announced that a government pledge to cut pesticide use in half by 2018 would be delayed until 2025. “We set a goal that was too ambitious without giving the means to change the production model,” he said in a newspaper interview.

And the pesticide controversy is only part of a larger debate about the deployment of chemicals in vineyards. A 2013 report by a team of scientists near Bordeaux examined more than 300 French wines from the 2007 and 2008 vintages of the Rhône and the wider Aquitaine region. It found that 90 percent contained traces of chemicals commonly used to treat vines. Even some organic wines were tainted with pesticide residues, most likely a result of contamination from neighboring vines.

One challenge facing wine producers is that there is neither a definition nor regulation of what constitutes a “pure” or “natural” wine in France. Wines defined as organic by the European Union are produced from organically grown grapes that can be chemically manipulated, with limitations on the use of sulfites, in the winemaking process. Many producers call their wines natural, which connotes a further step: Nothing can be added or removed during winemaking. Some natural winemakers add a small quantity of sulfites at bottling; others do nothing more than bottle fermented grape juice, call it wine and hope that it’s fit to drink. Biodynamic methods involve a holistic, almost spiritual approach to the ecosystem that treats the soil as an organism in its own right.

Jean-Robert Pitte, the celebrated French geographer, author of several books on food and wine and president of l’Académie du Vin de France, said a balance must be struck. “If you use too much pesticide, you kill the soil,” he said. “I feel passionately that you must keep the soil alive.”

On the other hand, he believes in the utility of pesticides. “If the disease is very serious and very contagious, then yes, it’s dangerous not to use these treatments at all,” he said. “I’m suspicious of those who refuse all treatment — it’s like treating human illnesses.”

The first of the weekend tastings, Renaissance, in Angers on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, brought together producers who make organic, pesticide-free, but not necessarily sulfite-free, wines. The unlikely star was Emmanuel Giboulot, a vineyard owner near Beaune in the celebrated Côte d’Or region.

Mr. Giboulot, 53, produces high-quality organic, biodynamic red and white grapes on 25 acres of vines, which he turns into wines under the names Côte de Beaune and Haute Côte de Nuits. Tall, soft-spoken, square-jawed and dimple-chinned, he appears more professor than rabble-rouser. But in December, he won a long court battle granting him the right to refuse a government order to spray a pesticide named Pyrevert on his vines.

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Emmanuel Giboulot

“We’re caught in a paradox,” he told me. “The wine industry fights for pesticides at the same time that it argues that great French wine can only come from the country’s terroir,” that elusive combination of soil, weather, geography and emotional connection to the land. “The only way to protect and maintain the terroir,” he added, “is to keep it as pure as possible.”

In the spring of 2013, all wine producers in Burgundy, in central France, were ordered to spray pesticides on their vines to combat a leaf-hopping insect that spreads flavescence dorée or “golden rot,” a deadly bacterial disease. Mr. Giboulot refused, saying there was no evidence of infection in his vines or others in his swath of Burgundy, one of the world’s most prestigious wine-growing regions. He claimed that Pyrevert kills beneficial insects as well.

Charged with defying the order, Mr. Giboulot faced six months in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros ($33,600). In April 2014, he was convicted and fined 1,000 euros ($1,100) by an appeals court.

There are many other natural wine producers in Burgundy, and all over France, and many quietly resisted the government order, usually by buying the pesticide but not using it. The outspoken Mr. Giboulot became the prime target. Some in the industry accused him of putting all of the vineyards of Burgundy at risk. The region’s main association of wine producers and traders said wine growers had a right to protect their livelihoods from a plague that only pesticides could stop. They compared the threat to phylloxera, the pest that wiped out French vineyards in the 19th century. They accused Mr. Giboulot of lying about the quantity of chemicals used.

In the end, golden rot appeared in only three villages in all of the Côte d’Or — and none in Mr. Giboulot’s area, the Côte de Beaune. He became a hero for organic food and wine supporters around the world, including many of his fellow French wine producers; more than 500,000 people signed a petition supporting his cause.

An appeals court in Dijon ruled in Mr. Giboulot’s favor, decreeing that the senior national administrator in the region had acted illegally by ordering all of Burgundy’s vineyards to be sprayed when there was no immediate threat. In a further punitive action, the court ruled that both the administrator and the local agricultural board had acted without seeking proper approval from the Ministry of Agriculture.

Other pesticide-averse wine producers have not fared as well. Stefano Bellotti, who runs the Cascina Degli Ulivi farm and vineyard in the Piedmont region of Italy, was at the Renaissance tasting telling merchants and wine lovers how Italian authorities had stripped his wines of their Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita stamp of regional authenticity.

Unlike Mr. Giboulot, who said he would treat his vines with natural pesticides if they were truly threatened, Mr. Bellotti is dead set against them. “Pesticides are weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “They have stripped the soil of its minerals. You have to listen to the soil, communicate with it and create a natural balance — just like the Etruscans did thousands of years ago.”

So Mr. Bellotti decided to plant peach, almond and maple trees and mustard greens near his vines to create a more balanced soil and inhibit vine diseases. He introduced chickens and ducks to eat plants that could potentially weaken the vines. “The inspectors ruled that I no longer produced a single crop and no longer could call my vines a vineyard,” he said. “For them, I guess I’m making an undefined liquid — not wine.”

Mr. Bellotti’s wines are so well regarded that he was cast as one of the stars in “Natural Resistance,” a 2014 documentary by Jonathan Nossiter about natural-wine rebels.

If the Renaissance salon was the most established of the nonpesticide tastings, Les Anonymes, a short distance away, was the most radical and uncompromising. There, many of the labels were handmade; many of the hundreds of wines offered had the same rough edge as the wine my Sicilian grandfather made in the backyard of our house in Buffalo every summer.

“I do fermented grape juice in a bottle, period,” said Lilian Bauchet, who produces a Gamay de Beaujolais under the name Sur la Root, a play on the title of the Jack Kerouac novel “On the Road” (“Sur la Route”).

In Saumur, about 26 miles away, a much larger group of nearly 200 winemakers from 15 countries displayed its wares in a warren of cold, damp troglodyte caves. Called La Dive Bouteille, it has become the world’s largest annual natural wine exposition, with 3,000 visitors this year.

“Every year, it gets more exciting,” said Camille Rivière, a New York-based wine importer-distributor of natural wines, as she strolled the aisles in search of that new, fresh, brilliant taste. “These salons allow growers to exchange ideas, and we’ve seen the quality improve over the years. Some like to say it’s a fad, but people who start drinking these wines never go back to the traditional.”

Correction:March 2, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the years of the vintages studied by scientists in a 2013 French wine report. They were 2007 and 2008, not 2009 and 2010.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Delicate Balance for ‘Pure’ French Wine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe